Agreed.  Hopefully pools and major solo operators can see that their long term profitability is based MORE on the growth of Bitcoin than the short term orphan cost.   Hopefully large pools are aware they don't need universal support.  If 70% of hashpower agrees to produce larger blocks (say 500KB avg) for the good of the network.  It cuts the orphan cost by 70%.   Still I think the orphan cost does highlight the reality that miners are going to be increasingly reluctant to devote more space to free tx.  This is something users will have to come to grips with.   Including a fee and waiting hours or days is unacceptable (although it is often for non-fee reasons) however no fee tx should be considered charity by users and if someone does you an act of charity in an hour, or day, or week well you got what you paid for.  The default behavior of most clients should probably be changed to include the "min fee" on ALL txs not just low priority ones.  If users want to they could change this but they should be warned "Including no tx fee may result in delayed confirmation times".  Enforcement for relaying at node level should still only be on low priority. 

It is somewhat ironic that this is more of an issue due to the higher exchange rate.  The min fee on low priority tx was lowered due to rising exchange rate.  Today 3.3 mBTC is ~$1.50.  Ouch.  However if Bitcoins were worth less it would be less of a cost.  Since Bitcoin is often used as a proxy for USD a 5 mBTC fee (which more than covers orphan costs) is more viable at a lower exchange rate.